How Influencers Can Help You Scale Your Brand’s Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs are a tried and true way to grow your revenue, but what happens when you want to scale even further? 

Supplementing your existing affiliate program with influencers can help you unlock even more potential. By tapping into an influencer’s following, you can reach new audiences, build trust, and drive sales.

Plus, it doesn’t have to be complicated. You can incorporate influencer affiliate marketing tactics into your existing program. This blog will provide an in-depth guide on how to do just that.

Affiliate Marketing vs Influencer Marketing: What’s the Difference? 

First, let’s start by defining affiliate marketing and influencer marketing.

What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing where affiliate partners earn compensation or commission for driving sales, leads, or clicks. With affiliate marketing, you pay for results, making it a great way to increase conversions.

What is influencer marketing? Influencer marketing focuses on relationship building, and partnering with individuals who have an engaged, trusting audience that aligns well with your brand. Influencer marketing focuses on expanding reach, broadening awareness, and building trust. 

So, what are the three main differences between affiliate and influencer marketing? 

1. Compensation: Affiliates earn commission for results; influencers typically charge a flat fee, get free products, or use a hybrid approach combining a flat fee and commission.
2. Content type: Affiliates focus on evergreen, transactional content; influencers produce lifestyle, social-focused content that tends to be more aspirational.
3. Goal: Generally, affiliates help drive direct and measurable outcomes, like sales; influencers improve brand awareness and credibility, helping you benefit from the trust they have authentically nurtured with their audience. 

There’s a lot of overlap between affiliate and influencer marketing. Your affiliates can be influencers, and influencers can be affiliates. Considering a combined approach where the two work in harmony can produce even better results than each tactic alone.

How to Integrate Influencers Into Your Affiliate Marketing Program

Both affiliate marketing and influencer marketing can help you reach untapped audiences. Influencer marketing doesn’t need to be separate from your affiliate marketing program – they can be complementary. Influencers can fill a much-needed gap, bringing trust and storytelling to your affiliate marketing program. 

Reach Your Target Audience

An influencer's following is built around a community of like-minded people with similar interests, lifestyles, and demographics. This makes their audience highly segmented, targeted, and engaged. 

Think of it this way: most people would much rather someone they find relatable recommend a new product to them, as opposed to a generic affiliate-driven blog or coupon site. With an authentic endorsement from an influencer, you can gain more visibility among these niches, and build credibility and confidence. 

Fit Influencers Into Your Current Affiliate Partnerships

If you already have systems and processes in place for affiliate marketing, you can easily slot influencers into your program. Here are some tips on how to do this:

• Get influencers invested in the ongoing success of your partnership by offering affiliate-based incentives based on performance, like commissions, in addition to upfront fees.
• Offer influencers access to a portal where they can track their results in real time.
• Provide personalized tracking links and unique discount codes to make measuring contributions easy.

Five Key Steps to Find The Right Influencers to Partner With

Just like when choosing your affiliate partners, finding the right influencer is important. Not everyone has the same amount of credibility with your audience. 

Aligning yourself with the wrong influencer can do more harm than good. However, by using a multi-pronged approach, you can recruit influencers that are authentic and willing to go the extra mile to produce measurable results. 

Here are five key steps to finding the right influencers to partner with:

1. Understand the Different Influencer Tiers

Depending on the goal of your influencer affiliate marketing campaign, you should consider different influencer tiers. Bigger isn’t always better, and vice versa. Here’s a high-level breakdown of influencer tiers and which one to choose based on your resources and goals:

2. Connect with Known Influencers and Perform Manual Search on Instagram

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Reaching out to influencers who you already know or follow within your niche is a great place to start. You could even look for influencers who have previously mentioned your product organically to see if they’d be interested in a formal arrangement. 

To discover new influencers, you can manually search Instagram or TikTok using hashtags and location tags to find relevant creators. Checking out who’s following competitors’ brands is another great way to find influencers who are interested in what you do.

3. Use Tools to Discover New Influencers

If you don’t have time to perform manual searches, there are plenty of great influencer discovery platforms, like Aspire, Upfluence, or Klear, that can help you find partners. Using an influencer discovery tool can help you save time by filtering by demographics and providing an easy look at engagement rates.

4. Ensure Brand Alignment with the Influencer 

Working with an influencer is a two-way street. Not only is an influencer endorsing your brand when they choose to work with you, you’re also endorsing the influencer when you choose to work with them. 

Because of this, ensuring you’re aligned on your values, voice, and point of view is important. Working with the wrong influencer can damage brand trust instead of building it. Carefully review the influencer’s content and past collaborations. Do they come across consistent and authentic? Do they share beliefs your audience will relate to? Do they come across overly promotional? 

Focus on finding the right fit first, then consider the size of their following after. 

5. Review Important Metrics

While follower count is important, it only paints part of the picture. Here are other metrics you should consider when finding influencers to partner with:

• Engagement rate (likes, comments, shares, reposts, etc.)
• Audience demographics (location, age, gender, interests)
• Quality of the content
• Posting consistency
• Other affiliate or influencer partnerships

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Using Influencers to Scale Your Brand’s Affiliate Sales

Influencers are a great way to supercharge an existing affiliate program. Here’s how.

Reach New Untapped Audiences

If your affiliate program is going well, but you’re struggling to tap into new audiences, influencers can help. Collaborating with the right influencer will help you break into competitive markets and segments.

Experiment with New Messaging

Unsure how new messaging or positioning is going to land? Use your influencer’s audience as a testing ground. Provide the influencer a creative brief with guidance on your new messaging. Then, gauge how it resonates by reviewing comments, engagement metrics, and conversions. 

Get More Sales with User-Generated Content and Social Proof

Showing has always been more powerful than telling. User-generated content created by influencers will go a long way towards demonstrating the quality and performance of your product, leading to more sales. Make sure to incorporate the ability to reshare and distribute influencer-created content on your branded socials into your contract. 

Build Instant Credibility and Trust 

An influencer’s entire platform is built on credibility and trust with their audience. Individuals are more trustworthy than companies, so working with an influencer can give buyers the final seal of approval they need to click ‘checkout’.

Create Influencer-Specific Offers and Collections

Collaborating with influencer affiliate partners to offer an exclusive deal can help them drive even more conversions. 

When developing influencer-specific offers, consider:

• Providing an extra discount on top of your typical promo code amount
• Sweetening the deal with a discount and a bonus, like free shipping, viral gift wrapping, or free gift with purchase
• Curating a collection of products the influencer loves at a steeper, more exclusive discount
• Making the deal time-bound to increase urgency

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Take Influencer Affiliate Marketing to the Next Level: More Tips to Grow Sales From Influencers

Now that you know how to find influencers to work with, let’s explore ideas for how to maximize results for long-term program growth.

Use Technology to Track Influencer Sales & Commissions

Understanding how your campaigns are performing is not just important for you, but also your affiliate and influencer partners. It’s important that you can transparently track progress, compensation, and rewards to calculate ROI and make accurate payouts. 

A platform like LeadDyno can help simplify how you track your influencer sales and commissions with:

• Unique tracking links and discount codes
• Automated commission calculations and payouts
• Real-time, transparent reporting
• A custom affiliate/influencer portal with helpful resources and real-time performance data

An affiliate and influencer marketing platform allows you to tap into sophisticated features to boost your program performance, streamline processes, and improve credibility among top creators. 

Choose the Right Social Networks

If you’ve never dabbled in an influencer marketing program before, don’t try to boil the ocean. Narrow down the social networks that will be the most effective and then search for influencers on that platform. Different networks have different strengths. For example:

• Instagram is great for showcasing beautiful imagery and lifestyle shots. If your product is aesthetically pleasing, Instagram may work best.
• TikTok is ideal for showcasing practicality and how your product actually functions in real-world scenarios.
• YouTube is fantastic for in-depth walkthroughs and reviews, making it perfect for more complicated, technical, or expensive products and services.

Ensure Compliance and Follow Best Practices for Authenticity

Keeping your influencer program above board is essential. Make sure you and your influencer partners are following all legal compliance and transparency guidelines and laws. FTC and local regulations require all ads to be disclosed. Don’t try to disguise sponsored or paid content as organic. It’s better to be upfront than lose trust or incur fines.

Here are some more best practices to keep influencer content from appearing too promotional and inauthentic:

• Encourage influencers to voice their true opinions without reading from a script you wrote.
• Monitor an influencer's activity to ensure ongoing alignment with your core values. 
• Focus on building a long-term partnership with consistent promotion.

Final Thoughts

Influencers can bring a new level of trust, authenticity, and credibility to your already successful affiliate program. By working with the right creators, you can tap into new audiences and drive meaningful business results. 

LeadDyno makes it easy to scale your influencer affiliate marketing program, providing advanced real-time tracking, streamlining commission calculations, and automating payouts. 

Want to learn more about managing affiliate and influencer marketing with LeadDyno? Start a free trial today.